Time was passing way too slowly, and there were way too many babies stuffed into one place, and that one place they were stuffed had contained almost exclusively two adults for the entire long-ass time that had passed. One of the adults was Ofosu, who barely counted since he had barely made physical contact with any of the babies (except for when Emmett marched in and handed off Synnöve to the man). The other adult was Ruben. He was not even technically an adult yet but, being the only other one present who was both a) genuinely alive and b) genuinely human, and also c) capable of swallowing his dinner instead of spitting it out on his own clothes, definitely counted as an adult here.

He assumed there were circumstances where spitting was preferable over swallowing. He’d been on the receiving end of that on a few occasions, at least, and could verify that it wasn’t the worst. But this gross fake baby belonging to Jacob that had spit up its gross fake pea-and-carrot mush on his jeans not once but twice since his arrival to the Daycare Doomtent… This was another thing entirely. Ruben was extremely tempted to just tie its bib over its face and leave it at that. Unfortunately, part of his task tonight required him to not fail his classmates by fake starving, suffocating, or otherwise depriving their fake babies of fake life. So Jacob’s baby kept crying, and he kept attempting to make it sleep, and when that didn’t work, he just kept feeding it.

Its diaper was nasty and cleaning it might’ve helped with the whole crying thing, Ruben logically knew, but as much as he wanted to avoid getting fake pea-and-carrot vomit on his clothes again, he wanted even more to avoid the fake crap coming out its other end. He had managed to avoid having to change a single diaper on his own fake baby, thanks to Emmett being super-bonded to it or whatever and refusing to let him keep it for more than an hour or so at a time. (Even that was more a case of giving it to Ruben when it was Absolutely Necessary rather than at Ruben’s request.) This arrangement was just fine by him. Jacob could take a page out of Emmett’s bookmagazine pamphlet (let’s be real, the guy was an idiot on the best of days and Ruben was certain there wasn’t much content going on inside his head) and deal with his own baby’s diaper later.

“Someone doesn’t look happy.”

“Me, or this broken goat?” Ruben returned irritably, pushing Jacob’s baby off his lap so that he could check out the damages of his latest spit-up. ‘Goat’ was a reference to the fact that goats ate everything. Jacob’s baby would not eat anything, actually was eating in reverse, and so it was broken. This probably needed explanation to make sense, but Ruben wasn’t in the mood to explain. Camilla’s joke further soured his mood - it was a reminder of Rose’s little jab earlier in the evening. A jab that hadn’t even registered at first, because duh, Marissa had used like five types of protection and there were no real babies in their future, but then he’d had a few rare minutes of silence when the noisiest baby had fallen asleep and it had occurred to him that he hadn’t technically verified with Marissa that she wasn’t pregnant. She probably would’ve told him if she was, but still he had decided he probably should check in with her. Except she was with Russell all the damn time and, as tempting as it was to talk procreation with her in front of the dude, Danny would whine about him being a bully if he learned about it, which he almost definitely would since they were somehow friendly again re: their group costume and yes of course he knew about the Breakfast Club, it’s not like they got to escape all the American pop culture garbage in Sweden, and ---

And Camilla’s joke brought this all back to mind. Ugh. Ruben scoffed loudly. “Do not worry. You will not ever be gifted with the appearance of small me’s at RMI.” He said this very strongly and confidently because no Marissa wasn’t pregnant. Nope. (Ugh, again.) “Are you taking it away?” he questioned, jerking his head to indicate the baby Camilla had picked up. “Tackar Gud, it has been one of the worst.” Not strictly true because they all sucked, but whatever.

Things hadn't been going as well as Camilla had expected, and they didn't seem to have a plan to get improved in the near future. It wasn't that something terribly bad had happened, things were the... more

Camilla had to give it to Ruben that the babies, or the fake babies, surrounding them were creepy and gross. In fact, if babies were a pinch of what these creatures were she had to admit that it was... more